Box of Delights

After the Lanvin festivities we positively tore downtown to the Box to catch Adele singing (beautifully) some of her haunting anthems. She really is a force of nature. The crowd was excitingly pan-generational. Mary Charteris wore an Afghan headdress as a flapper bandeau, Kate wore a white tuxedo, and the truly ageless Deborah Harry was a vixen in panther sequins. Barbara Hulanicki, in trademark dark glasses and peroxide shag, has seen all the hysteria before; she created Biba, the original Swinging London fashion emporium. In its grandest incarnation, as I remember, she took over the vast old thirties department store of Derry & Toms in dusty Kensington and transformed it into an Art Deco opium den, dimly lit and smelling of patchouli. It was, without question, the most wondrously atmospheric store I have ever been in, from that day to this. It certainly turned my impressionable head when I used to go as a child with my mother in the early seventies, and its leopard upholstery and vases filled with single-color ostrich feathers or peacock plumes would have a profound impact on my jejune decorating schemes. Who needed soccer posters when you could have Mucha or Erté instead?